I think it's pretty clear what happened to our flying cars and jet packs. We'd probably have second generation warp drive by now if it weren't for our infinite capacity for pettiness. You've gotta at least give us credit for the ability to think abstractly, though. Our wooden clubs are virtual now. Well, except for all our nuclear warheads. They're still real enough.

Hey. I've been interacting with people in a forum outside of OSNews, LWN, and my other usual haunts. It's a forum for enthusiasts of a particular type of economy car. And I must say that the experience has been ghastly. Rude. Thoughtless. And with this pervading mentality that using a lot (multiple lines) of repeating animated graphical emoticons is a sign of computer literacy. As is, of course, posting information in the form of images rather than text. You should always scan the text and post it as an image or you're just not 'leet there. And people will tell you so in no uncertain terms.

It really makes me wonder if AOL did really ruin the Internet back in the 90s and I'm just now noticing.

Anyway, I wanted to say that it has given me a new appreciation of the quality of discourse we enjoy here. Our worst trolls are more pleasant to deal with than the average participant there. Which is a shame. Because there are not many alternatives to it.

Current Linux kernels do not honor the -m or -d options to ulimit, which are supposed to limit the rss and data segment sizes of processes. This leaves only the mostly useless -v option, which limits the mostly meaningless "virtual memory". Is there a real way to place limits upon a user's or process' memory consumption under current Linux kernels?

I figured I'd share a post I just made to doctorwhoforum.com here. Let's not bash each other's OSes, but have some fun. In "The Sarah Jane Adventures" series, she has both a desktop computer, which has no name, and "Mr. Smith" which is an... err... somewhat more elaborate rig:

Does anyone recognize the OS/GUI which Sarah Jane (and Rose in "The Stolen Earth") uses? It doesn't look like Windows. It doesn't look like MacOS X. It does not look like Linux or *BSD running KDE, Gnome, E, or any other DE or WM with which I am familiar. It does look a bit like RISC OS. But it's not that either. Yeah, it's probably something invented by the CGI team which is not encumbered by patents, copyrights, trade secrets, or trademarks. But it is fun to speculate. The gods only know what Mr. Smith runs. Probably some some future variant of Plan9. ;-)

I believe I read that OSNews conversions were for tech discussion, and I have an issue which I've Googled and Googled but the answer is still not clear to me.

I know that NFS does some client-side caching, and have read that ensuring complete cache consistency between clients is expensive, so NFS implements a lesser guaranty which is good enough for "everyday file sharing".

I have a server that runs many sessions of a multiuser Cobol accounting application. I have a need to run one session of the app on another box, with the Cobol C/ISAM data files mounted via NFS. The application, obviously, will be reading and writing individual records within the files, and proper locking is employed such that clients running on the server do not step on each others' changes to the files. But can I trust that NFS is going to handle this properly and not cause corruption?